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Bungie's made some changes to Marathon's titular end game map, the Cryo Archive level of the Marathon ship, to hopefully make it a little less offputting. This continues the developer's campaign to make a spectacularly unwelcoming game just a little more welcoming.
Marathon update 1.0.6.2 rolled out today, and among the short patch notes, a focus on Cryo Archive caught my eye. This is very much in line with a recent, larger patch which smoothed some pointy bits in the broader Marathon experience, giving newer or friendlier players some breathing room.
With this update, Bungie's hit two pain points with Cryo Archive. Firstly, we'll now be able to claim one free Cryo Archive-exclusive sponsored kit each weekend. This kit comes with a bundle of blue gear and some healing items, which is enough to get you going until you find better gear deeper in – perhaps borrowed from some other kind runners.
Bungie originally gave players one of these kits when Cryo Archive launched, both to ease folks in and to get them over the minimum gear ante. Ever since, I've wondered why the heck they don't do that every weekend, or at least make them buyable. It feels like a very easy carrot to offer alongside no shortage of stick. So, this is a good change.
Secondly, Bungie's addressed the topical, infuriating issue of teams in Cryo Archive invading your spawn point within minutes. Simply put, Bungie has sealed off some common routes used to hunt other teams at the start of a match.
Skilled players who know the map well can use vents in Cryo Archive to access some side areas of the map without getting their security clearance – a fairly simple mechanic baked into everything in Cryo, increased by gathering keys from enemies and using monitors – above level one.
It is not uncommon for teams in certain spawn areas to enter what should be a safe room filled exclusively with UESC bots, only to wind up getting gunned down by enemy runners who they can't reliably anticipate.
Ordinarily, you start a round of Cryo by killing a few robots to get to security level one or two, and only then do you set a course for specific areas or keys depending on what you brought in and what your goals are. Cutthroat players quickly worked out that killing other teams, either to bag their loot or simply reduce the number of threats in the map, is often the safest way to play Cryo Archive, which helped fuel this hyper-aggressive strategy. There's that, plus a shrinking player base means lobbies are only getting sweatier on average.
It's no fun getting mulched before you even get a chance to really play Cryo Archive, so Bungie has been yanking the leash on PvP players rushing folks like they're wearing Void in the damn Wildness in Old School RuneScape. "We'll continue to monitor and be on the lookout for more instances like this to ensure we keep spawns in a fair state," the developer says.
Here's a stealth bit of Cryo Archive news to round things out: the WSTR shotgun, infamous for insta-gibbing folks in Cryo's close hallways, has been rebalanced yet again. This time, Bungie's upped the base damage slightly (from 78 to 85) but reduced the critical multiplier (from 1.15x to 1.05x), steering it toward more reliable body shots. A whopping 75% damage bonus against AI targets has also been added to the WSTR, which I assume will result in UESC bots waving a little white flag as soon as you aim this thing their way.
Marathon boss says extraction shooters are like The Lord of the Rings and that's why they need PvP.
